ITV's senior management today complained that it was locked into a "ratings rat race" which forced its flagship channel ITV1, home to Coronation Street and The X Factor, to air programmes aimed at the "lowest common denominator".

Adam Crozier, ITV chief executive, admitted to a "remarkable lack of diversity" in ITV1's schedule compared with 10 years ago and claimed advertising airtime sales restrictions had "led us to chase higher-rating programmes, things like soaps and what have you".

The ITV chairman, Archie Norman, referred to the broadcaster being stuck in a "ratings rat race". "We need to be able to move away from the ratings rat race we are caught in," the former Asda boss and Tory MP said. "We are driven to look for mass audiences, so it in a sense drives us to the lowest common denominator."

Crozier, who joined ITV in April after running the Royal Mail and the FA, said that if ITV was allowed to ditch Contract Rights Renewal, the mechanism governing airtime sales deals that financially punishes ITV1 if viewing levels drop, it would be able to invest more in genres including drama, arts and factual.

"Ad revenue has fallen by about 22% since CRR was introduced [in 2003]. That has led us to invest less and less in programmes," Crozier told the Lords communications committee.

"It has led us to chase higher-rating programmes, things like soaps and what have you. And therefore the diversity of our schedule today is very different from the diversity of our schedule seven to 10 years ago because we have to invest in programmes that drive the biggest audiences, rather than the most unique audiences," he said. "Were we not to have CRR in place [and ITV] not have to chase volumes of impact that would allow us to have a much more diverse schedule. That is certainly the plan."

He added that it was clear that there is a "remarkable lack of diversity" in any comparison of ITV's schedule in the past. "Advertisers would like us to target more unique audiences, rather than the same audiences again and again and again but the system works against that," Crozier said.

Crozier was effectively asked by the committee if he could give a guarantee that a CRR-free ITV would create a more diverse schedule by investing in regional news, an area the broadcaster has said is too uneconomical to continue to maintain in the long term. "Certainly we would put programming right at the top [of areas that would benefit from CRR being scrapped]," he said. "ITV has regionality at its heart."

Before peers including Lord Bragg, the former ITV controller of arts and presenter of The South Bank Show, ditched by the broadcaster last year, Crozier added: "Not chasing audiences would open up things like the arts, like more drama, like more factual programming."

Crozier also suggested that there was a case for the culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, to step in to look at CRR, rather than it going back to the Competition Commission again. In May the competition regulator rejected ITV's latest bid to have CRR removed.

"The market has changed fairly demonstrably since 2006 [when the case for removing CRR first began to be looked at]," he said. "I think we need to move away from a very narrow argument [of the market definition used to look at the impact of CRR]. I think that's why we feel part of the solution is the government looking at this through secondary legislation."

However, Crozier maintained that ITV did not believe there needed to be a entire review of the TV ad trading market alongside any CRR review.

"I believe Ofcom looked into this earlier this year and concluded it wasn't right [to launch a review]," he said. "In fact although the market looks opaque from the outside those inside know how it works very well. I think having seen the fact it has taken four years to look into pieces of the market [with the CRR review] a market review could take years."

ITV reckons it has lost about £262m in revenue it could have used in areas including boosting programming since CRR was introduced in 2003.

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